Alien Isolation Review: You're going to die. A lot.

I've rarely been a fan of the horror genre in video games. There have been a few gems here and there like Silent Hill and Little Nightmares but for the most part, games do horror really badly. Horror needs to enfeeble its audience. We can't be gun slinging badasses if you want to scare us, we need to be small creatures scurrying around to avoid the monsters if we're going to be properly terrified.

Games for the most part have moved more toward using gore and violence in lieu of actual scares and the horror genre historically hasn't sold very well so it seemed like horror games would always be the industry's redheaded step child.

When Alien Isolation was announced it sounded like it could break this mold. No only was it bringing back one of the most iconic movie monsters of all time it was doing so with the explicit understanding that you couldn't kill the monster.

I'm a huge fan of the Alien license, it's one of my all time favorite monsters and I love horror films. This promised to be a match made in heaven and I picked up the game the day it was released.

My initial encounter with Alien Isolation was disappointing. The game starts off VERY slowly and the corridors are so dark I had a hard time orientating myself and finding my way around. I gave up on it after two hours of being stuck in a series of corridors with no idea where to go or how to get out.

However a few years later I watched a fascinating documentary on the AI of Alien Isolation published by AI and Games (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt1XmiDwxhY). I strongly recommend this video for anyone with an interest in AI or video game design. It so intrigued me that I resolved to tweak the game graphical settings to make it easier to see and try Alien Isolation again.

The game still starts off slowly, only hitting its stride around 30-45 minutes in (if you know what you're doing) but once I hit that mark, I found much to appreciate.

Alien Isolation is a very creative horror-survival game produced by Creative Assembly. A love letter to Alien fans, the game has a look and feel derived from the original movies: a sort of "future imperfect" visual style similar to how people in the 1970s imagined the future might be. The game has a very impressive atmosphere and visual design. Halls are narrow and claustrophobic. The space station doesn't seem clean or well kept, it's hostile territory and barely functional.

The narrative places you in the role of Amanda Ripley, Ellen Ripley's daughter who is determined to discover what happened to her mother.

Alien Isolation is one of the few genuinely frightening games I have ever played. The game does an amazing job of making you feel alone and vulnerable. Outside of a few "scripted" appearances, the Alien hunts you using a dynamic AI so it can show up anywhere, anytime. If you make any significant amount of noise it will drop in and start hunting you. This forces you to sneak around, hiding regularly. Worse yet, conflict with other enemies on the station will attract the Alien's attention in short order. A few gun shots can be heard from a long way off.

The Alien is VERY quick and has enhanced senses compared to the other enemies in the game. Make any loud noise (even if the Alien is several rooms away) and it will hear you and come to investigate. The Alien is terrifying because not only is it exceptionally good at hunting you down but it always kills you in one hit. If the Alien finds you, you're done.

The animation and sounds for the Alien are just perfect. Hearing the Alien pace nearby, snarling and growling, while you cower under a table or hide in a closet are some of the best horror moments I've ever experienced. You always wonder if the Xenomorph has detected you and is about to drag you out of your hiding place and kill you.

Later in the game the Alien's hunting algorithm improves markedly and it starts searching hiding places it would have missed before. Sometimes it will jump back into the vents with its trademark "I'm leaving" roar and then immediately comes right back into the room trying to trick you. It might even remain perfectly quiet and motionless for a full minute, hoping you'll be fooled into thinking it's gone away when you see it vanish from the motion tracker.

There are literally no permanent safe spots from the Alien. I've seen the Alien crawl into vents and check storage closets trying to find me. Hiding is nothing but a temporary refuge. Given enough time, the Alien WILL check everywhere you could possibly be and drag you out of your hiding place. The first time it checks a room it may not bother looking in closets or under desks unless you give it a reason to but it will check there eventually. So hide when you need to but keep moving toward your destination. Unlike other enemies, the Alien can hear you through walls, ceilings, and floors. You can keep the Alien close and eventually let it find you simply by regularly checking the motion tracker because the Alien can hear it beeping. After a great deal of trial and error, I discovered the real secret to success is to keep moving and try to be aware of what floor the Alien is on. Usually when the Alien is hunting you it will have a large area to explore and search. While the Alien moves very quickly, if it doesn't hear anything or find anything near you, eventually it will fall back into the vents and check elsewhere or move to another floor. One trick I eventually learned is that just because the motion tracker says the Alien is right on top of you, doesn't mean you're in immediate danger because the Alien could be a floor above you or below you. You need to listen intently and learn to recognize the sounds of the Alien pacing near you versus the sounds it makes wandering around in the vents. Don't get me wrong, if you make noise, the Alien can get to you REALLY fast but you need to be aware of the 3 dimensional map and take advantage of the moments the Alien is elsewhere to progress. You're going to die a lot, there's no way around it, especially on higher difficulties. So grit your teeth and take your chances.

There also appear to be some unusual limitations for the Alien. Its hearing is excellent but its vision less so. At one point I managed to save my game about half way through a difficult encounter, grateful to be able to save my progress without having to do the entire thing all over again if I got caught. Then I turn around and see the Alien walking into the large room looking right at me. My heart sank because I thought I was not only dead but I had managed to dick over my entire save file (because each campaign only allows one) since upon respawn the Alien would still be there. However, I crouched down and slipped behind a table and the Alien didn't see me. I'd been standing right out in the open as he came in the room but he'd missed me. Even on harder difficulties you can often avoid the Alien by keeping some furniture between you and circling to stay out of its line of sight. However this is easier said than done as the Alien moves fast and in seemingly random directions at times so you need to be on the ball. It sounds like this would make the Alien less scary but trust me, the times you're out in the open desperately listening to the Alien to guess where it's going so you can adjust your position and stay in cover are some of the most stressful moments in the game.

The Alien is a gaming work of art during the early game: fast, frightening, and extremely unpredictable. You never know what it will do or where it will search next. When the Alien appears in a given area, it begins hunting for you using a "Traveling Salesman" algorithm. Essentially it has been programmed to check everywhere but with no guarantee that it will search these locations in an optimized fashion. In practice this means that you will often see the Alien double back on its search as if second guessing or doubting itself. The science behind this type of pathing algorithm is well understood but it creates a remarkable opponent in these games and Creative Assembly deserves great praise for designing the Alien's behavior so well. That said, some of the design decisions made by Creative Assembly during the second and third acts, start to make the Alien feel like it's worn out its welcome.

You'll encounter many enemies during the game, including humans, robots, and, of course, the titular Alien. Humans are usually easy to avoid or kill while the robots are much tougher. The Alien is simply invincible. You can't kill it. Ever. However you can fool it, you can outsmart it, and you can escape it.

Eventually you acquire a flamethrower which allows you to push the Alien back if it sees you but don't get overconfident. Even after acquiring this weapon, fuel is hard to come by and it takes a lot of fuel to scare it off. Even if you do scare it off, you better find a hiding spot immediately because the creature remembers exactly where you were and a minute or two later it will be back trying to ambush you.

Another thing the game deserves ample praise for is the way it subverts traditional gaming theory: Rather than our character being a strong ass kicking character (or at least becoming powerful over the course of the game), you'll spend most of the game hiding and sneaking around. You have very limited weapons and the weapons you do have aren't always that useful. Even after you find a shotgun which will kill humans without too much trouble, it's not all that effective against the Working Joes since I poured 6 rounds into their heads and chest without killing them; and don't even bother using it on the Xenomorph. Worse still the sounds of gun fire and combat will attract the Alien in short order so avoid it when you can.

The game is best understood in three acts (no spoilers yet). Although Act I starts slower than I would prefer, it really is exceptional with thrills, scares, and riveting game play. If the game had ended right after Act I (maybe with an extra mission or two to wrap up loose plot threads) I would have been completely satisfied with the game I got. However, the game has a flabby second act and an outright punishing third act that drains a large amount of the good will it has built up.

The story and characters aren't all that great but they are serviceable. We're playing this game to be scared, not to bond with the characters who are mostly just here to die anyway but making us fear for the life of a favorite character would have added substantially to the horror. The game's layout is very well designed and as you acquire new tools or simply explore new areas, you'll unlock doors allowing easy access to previous areas, very reminiscent of Dark Souls. That said the game doesn't leverage this feature nearly as efficiently as Dark Souls did and there is a staggering amount of backtracking the game inflicts on you just to pad out the game.

I had expected at the end of the game to have an opportunity to explore the entire station with all the tools I had, unlocking new doors and gathering collectibles but this doesn't happen. If you don't explore an area as you pass through it, you may not get another chance but while you're passing through an area, the Alien is never far behind and that's a huge penalty to anyone who might be inclined to slow down and explore or gather additional resources. The Alien can show up anywhere, anytime.

The game has no autosaves unless you finish a mission making save spots critical. Much like the bonfires in Dark Souls you can be frantically searching for a save spot and praying the Alien stays back just a few more seconds so you can log your progress and not have to run this whole section all over again.

My only major complaint with game play is that it's often difficult to figure out what you need to do. You have a mission to "restore power to the floor." Ok so, how do I do that? Your motion tracker does point toward your destination (most of the time) however it also makes noise so its not always safe to use. Also it just points you in a direction rather than giving precise directions. I can recall many times I was simply spinning in place staring at the motion tracker trying to figure out what the game wanted me to do next, while hearing the Alien hunting nearby.

In a game that so strongly emphasizes quick reactions and fast thinking (with such punishing penalties for failure) it is simply NOT acceptable for the player to be standing around confused about what to do next; Ever.

On a related note, I wish they had made interactable items and widgets easier to locate. They do glow but you have to be very close to them for that to happen. This means you can dismiss valuable items (or widgets built into the walls and floor) as decoration because you just happened to be a little too far away to trigger the graphic or context menu.

The context menu detection is kind of off too. You have to be in just the right place for the game to prompt you if you want to "use" an object built into the level and if the Alien is right behind you, you DON'T have time to make those adjustments. Usually this wasn't too bad but there was one ventilation shaft in the mid game that was terrible. I opened it easily but I spent no fewer than 90 seconds twisting and contorting trying to get the context menu to spawn so I could go in. This meant I had to constantly hide from the Alien as I desperately tried to climb into a vent and escape it. It was extremely frustrating.

Those are my major complaints about the game but honestly it's small potatoes and while Acts 2 and 3 may not be worth the price of admission, Act 1 is worth the full game price all on its own. This is the kind of game design I wish we'd see more of and I'd encourage everyone to give this game a try. If you're not into challenging and difficult game play, the game has a difficulty selection and you can crank it down a full four levels from default, with an additional super hard mode reserved for true fans. This game can be played by anyone with an interest in the Alien franchise or gamers interested in a new style of game in general.

Final Score: 8/10

<SPOILERS START HERE>

Amanda Ripley is approached by a man from Weyland-Yutani (essentially the corporation responsible for everything that goes wrong in the Alien Franchise universe) who tells her they have discovered the Flight Recorder from her mother's ship, and invites her out to a space station to recover it with them. When they arrive at this space station they discover it's crumbling around them and the few people left inside have descended into violence and tribalism in sheer terror for their lives. There's a monster stalking the halls: the titular Alien.

Ripley wanders through the station trying to regain contact with her ship until she finally encounters the Alien about 40 minutes in. The Alien ambushes and kills an NPC who has been helping us, leaving us to scramble and call a train car to get out of this part of the station before we're murdered. The train takes forever to arrive and you're staring at shadows with heart pulsing music and the shrieks of the Alien in the distance. I managed to just shut the train doors as the Alien dropped down a few feet away and threw itself at me. It was an excellently done introduction to the creature.

After our initial encounter, we won't see the creature again for a bit. Our next challenge is dealing with assorted armed and violent humans who are determined to hold their territory on the station and kill anyone from outside their gang. I understand that situations like this can bring out the worst in people but the "gang warfare" narrative presented here doesn't make a ton of sense. Apparently everyone on the station knows there's a killer on the loose and it's some kind of alien creature. Under these circumstances even idiots and psychopaths will recommend grouping together for mutual protection. The gang warfare attitude might make more sense if the NPCs were under the impression that there was no monster and it was another human killing them all, but no NPC we encounter has that belief.

You eventually sneak around the humans and once again encounter the Alien. You manage to hide from it and it slaughters the humans you previously avoided.

You proceed into an elevator narrowly avoiding the Alien and encounter the next enemy you need to contend with: Working Joes. These are robots, sort of a cheap knock off of the synthetics we've previously encountered in the franchise. These robots are both poorly programmed and maintained, prompting them to go berserk and attack if they find a person in a restricted area.

Your mission then leads you to the medical bay where you need to find supplies to treat an injured member of your team. This is also likely to be your first real encounter with the Alien. While it was possible to die to the Xenomorph prior to this if you made a ton of noise or just didn't respond to the situation promptly, this is the first time the Alien is actively hunting you.

This segment is tense, frustrating and extremely well executed. You spend most of this mission in hiding and darting between hiding places. My initial strategy was to hide in a room until the Alien searched it and then come out, confident that the Alien wouldn't come back to the room it just searched unless it heard a noise or something. This strategy almost got me killed several times. Unlike the other NPCs in the game, the Alien is extremely unpredictable and is apt to search a room then leave and reenter it to search some more.

After leaving the medical bay you'll spend a relatively easy level dealing with humans, robots, and the Alien. Paradoxically the level is easier than our prior mission (if you're quiet) because the Alien has so many other targets making so much noise around here, that it basically left me alone this level in favor of killing the other humans. There was also a much appreciated increase in the number of save points in this area. You return to your team mates with medical supplies and encounter the remaining security forces on the station who appear to be friendly.

Upon arriving at security HQ you get to interview a ship captain named Marlow who found the creature. This mission takes the form of a flashback that lets you explore LV-426 and the Space Jockey ship from the original Alien movie. The craftsmanship used in the design of the Space Jockey's ship is beautiful and very much appreciated by a true fan of the series. The Space Jockey looks very much like his original incarnation rather than his later "Engineer" form, being far less human looking and much much bigger. The Engineer from Prometheus is about eight feet tall but the Space Jockey from Alien was at least fifteen to twenty. The enormous mummified corpse towering over us is exactly what the game needs to drive home the insignificance of man as we emerge into a universe full of monsters.

Following this you'll work with the security forces to try to seal the Alien in a part of the station that can be locked down and isolated. When this gambit fails, the Marshall asks you to lead it out into a special science lab that can be physically ejected from the station and launched into space. When you lure the Alien in there, the Marshall betrays you, sealing you inside with the Alien and blasting you both off the station rather than risking the Alien escaping. Ripley manages to get into an airlock and space walks back to the station, leaving the Alien stranded in space. This ends what I think of as Act 1.

Act 1 is a perfect microcosm of everything right with the game. The scares are frequent and effective, I think this is the only game I've ever played that actually made me feel like I was being hunted by a cunning adversary. The game balances these scares perfectly, subjecting you to the Alien for a while then sending the Alien away to another part of the station to let you make progress without leaving you constantly in a blind panic. But don't get too comfortable because the Alien will be back shortly. Almost none of these encounters are scripted, it's the game physically managing the stress of the gamer to keep the player on edge but never brutalize him enough to make him actually quit.

Towards the end of Act 1, Ripley and the Alien are placed into smaller and smaller areas with fewer exits, ratcheting up the tension and difficulty.

After blowing the Alien out the airlock, you might assume that this is where we roll credits but surprisingly, we're only about halfway through the story at this point.

Ripley now starts to make her way back to security to settle things with the Marshall who betrayed her but all over the station, the robots suddenly go berserk. Before they would only attack you if you were in a restricted area, now they're actively hunting people all over the station.

You make your way to the station computer core and tell it the Alien has been ejected from the station and the situation is safe, however the AI refuses to lift the lock down because the Weyland-Yutani company has ordered it to preserve the Alien specimens and consider the humans on the station as expendable. This is a huge cliche but every Alien movie or game does it so at least they're consistent.

This news sends Ripley down into the station reactor core to force a system restart, however, in the core she discovers an enormous Alien nest with many more Aliens and several facehuggers. Ripley manages to overload the reactor core and destroy the nest sending all the remaining Aliens into a killing spree across the station. This ends Act 2.

Act 2 is flabby and feels like padding. You spend most of your time fighting the Working Joe androids and the Working Joes just aren't interesting enemies compared to the Alien. Worse, they can be far more annoying. The Joes follow very linear, scripted behaviors that you just need to memorize to get around them. Beyond that they are extremely difficult to kill and they are annoyingly persistent, hunting you for a very long time before giving up, forcing you to spend a great deal of time in hiding.

In addition, at the beginning of Act 2, the computer takes away all your weapons before allowing you into the computer core and you won't get them back. You'll find replacements for all your weapons in due course but if you have been saving up lots of ammo for future challenges enjoy watching all that ammo be removed from your inventory. The game forces you to give up all your weapons to avoid making the core too easy while you're fighting the Joes. This is a very transparent way of resetting your skill progression and I have no idea why they decided this was necessary.

Ripley visiting the Alien Nest really pulled me out of the game's immersion. I just can not believe that Amanda Ripley (a noncombatant) was able to walk into a Xenomorph nest and walk out alive. Yes, I know her mother did that to save Newt in Aliens but this was after the marines had killed dozens if not hundreds of Xenomorphs and all but depopulated the nest. Also, Ellen Ripley went to the nest armed with a Pulse Rifle, a flamethrower, and a grenade launcher. Amanda Ripley walks into this nest with noisemakers, flares, and whatever gadgets she's been able to build.

The designers may have thought this would crank up the tension but the Alien Nest mission takes us so far out of immersion that we don't experience the mission from the character Ripley's perspective: we experience it from the perspective of a gamer sensing we're about to be sent through another punishing gauntlet. Also it really reduces the fear factor from the Alien if it can't even kill us in its own lair. It's no longer such a singular threat and it starts to feel more like a typical game mechanic than an unstoppable perfect predator.

It's also confusing that everyone on the station was completely unaware of the fact that there wasn't one monster but dozens of them. It would also have made the Marshall's betrayal of Ripley completely pointless but this is never addressed.

The discovery of so many other Aliens also undercuts the first Act of the game and left me annoyed that my titanic battle with the creature hadn't really accomplished anything. This may be done deliberately to make the protagonist realize their helplessness but if so, I didn't find it effective.

Again I assumed that the game would end after destroying the nest and even though I regarded Act two as something of a padded anti-climax it was still a great game.

Act three is all about escaping the station but the entire act feels like God has taken the Aliens' side because every time you almost escape, something inexplicable happens that forces you to backtrack all the way to the other side of the station AGAIN(avoiding the Aliens, gun wielding humans, and murderous androids) in a very transparent bit of padding. Ripley escapes so many incidents that should have easily killed her in Act three that it began to effect my suspension of disbelief even in a game about giant bug monsters.

First Ripley will need to make her way to the shuttle bay and try to reach Marlow's ship. This involves moving through a gauntlet of Aliens, humans, and robots. Just to add to the frustration, most of the station is on fire now. After reaching the ship you discover his encounter with the Xenomorph has driven Marlow insane and he's decided to turn his ship into a giant fusion bomb to destroy the station and prevent the spread of the Aliens. You manage to stop the overload but the ship still blows up, heavily damaging the station which starts to fall from orbit. You have no choice but to return to the station and try to contact another ship. Next you'll be sent back across the entire station to the stellar observatory wing to locate the ship you can talk to and find the correct coordinates. Then you'll do a space walk to align the communications dish and open contact with the ship. Now you'll need to get to the docking area which takes you completely across the station all over again. This time you'll be wading through tons of armed and desperate humans and the Alien(s) will pop up constantly. Slogging through the station this time will be a grind.

The final mission is nothing short of abusive. It's just you and the Alien but this time the Alien won't leave for more than a few seconds and he's hunting you in a very small area. Worse still the Alien is able to navigate the area in seconds due to certain Alien-only shortcuts while getting from point A to point B takes you much much longer. The area is very poorly lit making navigation tricky but turning on your flash light is just signaling to the Alien.

This level was so punishing that I finally surrendered and cranked my difficulty down from Hard just out of desperation to be done with this game. The game has really outstayed its welcome by now. It's ceased to be fun at this point and has just become punitive. Worse yet, unless you're much better at exploring and gathering than me and have found lots and lots of resources, you're probably just about empty on everything so you have no abilities to distract the Alien much less make it back off.

Eventually you make your way to the docking ring and allow the ship to dock however just as you're putting your space suit on, an Alien ambushes you and drags you to its new nest all the way at the bottom of the station. You wake up cocooned to the wall which you manage to break out of with ridiculous ease (why you don't wake up impregnated makes no sense but whatever), forcing you to fight all the way back to the docking ring AGAIN. You start to make your way to the docking ring and almost get there but an elevator breaks down and drops you into the lower levels (Seriously, are you even surprised at this point?). You finally make it back to the docking ring and space walk out to the ship and prepare the ship for departure but are suddenly confronted by three Xenomorphs who have decided to go on a space walk for some reason. You unlock the ship and space walk to it, entering the airlock only to discover nobody on the ship is answering your hails any longer. Naturally, you discover the Xenomorphs are already on the ship (I have no idea how) so Ripley blows the two of them out the airlock and the game ends with Amanda Ripley floating in space awaiting an uncertain fate.

Act three was a brutal slog that relies heavily on luck to dart from save spot to save spot. In Act three I'd started desperately hoping that the game was about to end just so I could finally be done. By the end, the game starts to rely on cheap plot convenience to drag Ripley away from her destination three distinct times just to artificially pad out the game and force you to backtrack across the entire station again and again.

Finding the Aliens already on the ship makes so little sense I initially thought it was a dream sequence. How could they possibly come onboard at the same time as Ripley without her seeing them? Did the Xenomorphs knock and someone opened the airlock for them? Did a crew member leave their window open?

The game abruptly ends there with an ending I can only assume is sequel bait but given that the team responsible for Alien Isolation has apparently broken up and the game was not considered a commercial success, it's unlikely we'll see another game in this vein for some time.

Alien Isolation not only does a lot well but does it exceptionally well, especially in regards to its scares and the AI of its primary antagonist. It deserves due praise for all its successes but in the late game it also stumbles a lot, with unfairly punishing missions, artificial padding, and excessive and repetitive backtracking from one end of the station to the other.

I really want to see more games like this, not only in the Alien Universe but I'd want to see future horror game developers take this game as a standard of how to style and structure effective horror games. I'd like to give this game a very high score for everything it does right but I can't ignore all the missteps and stumbles toward the end of the game.

That said Alien Isolation is quite simply the best horror game I've ever played and it offers a new standard for the industry to live up to.

Final Score 8/10

P.S. One mistake that is absolutely unforgiveable: How can you possibly create an Aliens game without an achievement entitled "Game over man, Game over?"